Category: Activities

Man, that felt good

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So in the last week I’ve paddled three times with other people, for a total of 15 miles. That’s probably more than I paddled the entire month of August last year. And it felt so good. Not just to be out paddling, but to paddle with friends and re-experience the camaraderie and fun.

My shoulder is pretty sore after each paddle, but the recovery the next day is pretty encouraging. Yesterday Dan and I worked on a change to my technique that kept my hands lower to keep pressure off my shoulder – it used different muscles in my core, and they hurt while I was paddling and they feel quite tired today. I’m going to keep at this to see if it helps.

Something strange is going on…

There is something strange going on with my colo box. I tried to reboot it last month and it didn’t come up – I had to call my provider and get them to power cycle it. Nothing useful in the logs.

Yesterday I had to install a security update to the xen hypervisor, but I didn’t reboot. This morning, I discovered that the websites working on the xen guest (the domU in xen parlance) were not working. So I tried to log in, or ping, and discovered it wasn’t talking to the network. Fortunately the xen host (aka dom0) was working – I could log into it, then use xm console xen1 to log into the guest. Couldn’t find anything wrong, except it’s not talking to the network. Even “ifdown eth0; ifup eth0” doesn’t cure it. So I tried to reboot the guest, but it didn’t seem to come back up. I wondered if the hypervisor update I installed yesterday was the problem, so then I rebooted the whole computer, and it didn’t come back up either.

I drove down to the colo facility, and connected a monitor and keyboard, but nothing showed up. On the front panel, there are a couple of blinking lights. I power cycled. It came up just fine. Logged into the host, xm consoled into the guest, verified that I could ssh out, and from my home computer I could wget a few web pages from it. Issued a reboot command, and it booted just fine. Poked around the BIOS settings to see if there was something about not booting if there wasn’t a keyboard or something stupid like that, but couldn’t find anything. Booted, verified once more, and came home.

Until the next time, I guess.

A month with ownCloud, and I’m out

I really wanted to like ownCloud, the “Dropbox you host yourself” (my description, not theirs). It seemed so promising – I could have as much space as I wanted, it would be more private, etc etc etc. But I’ve had it installed for over a month now, and seen numerous upgrades to both the client and the server, and I’m ready to uninstall.

  • The 64 bit Linux client crashes and dies constantly. I’m actually somewhat surprised on the rare mornings when I wake up and discover it hasn’t crashed overnight. Yes, it crashes when nobody is modifying any of the files on any of the systems that share those files, sometimes multiple times a day when I can be bothered to restart it.
  • All the clients continually put up an error indicator at random times and then clear up at other random times. Again, usually when nothing is happening.
  • While it offers CalDav sync and I was able to add the calendar to my phone, iPad, and laptop calendars, I wasn’t able to use it to break free of the Google Calendar hegemony because I share calendars with other people and I couldn’t very well ask them to convert as well. They had a web based calendar of their own, but it is incredibly basic compared to say, Google Calendar or iCloud calendar.
  • Similar problem with the contact syncing.

Frankly I would have put up with all the other problems if the 64 bit Linux client wasn’t such a flakey piece of shit. But I see no reason to keep going with this if I’m getting no synchronization between my main desktop and my other computers.

A week with ownCloud

Last week I installed “ownCloud”, a Dropbox like file sharer where you run the server so nobody you don’t want gets control over your files. It also provides calendar and contact sharing, as well as supposedly providing an rss reader/aggregator to replace Google Reader, although I haven’t figured out how to implement that yet.

Installing it was pretty easy – I used the Debian packages hosted on opensuse for both the server and my linux box, and a more direct install on my MacBook. It took a bit of messing around to get ssl working on my web server because my sites-enabled config files were a mess that just barely worked in the past.

I added the documents folder on my MacBook to the ownCloud, and it synced. I could see all the files on the web interface. Then I moved the Documents dir on my Linux box out of the way, and added the ownCloud Documents dir to it. A little while later, all the documents from the Mac were now there on my Linux box. Then I moved all the docs that had been on the Linux box’s Document dir back into the dir, and watched as they appeared on the web interface and on my Mac. The very next day, the server was reporting that ownCloud version 5.0 was now out, and so I upgraded.

The upgrade didn’t go 100% smoothly. At one point in the web interface part of the upgrade, it appeared to stop doing anything, and so I reloaded the page. I’m not sure if that’s the cause of all my future problems, or just another symptom. At a later time I noticed an error appearing in the web admin page mentioning a duplicate key in an index. That probably isn’t good.

I didn’t run the old 4.7 version long enough to tell if it happened there, but this week I’ve noticed the following big problems:

  • frequently throughout the day, the “dock icon” on Linux or the toolbar icon on the Mac will indicate a problem, but it will go away on its own. The error mentions something about being unable to find a sync file.
  • the linux client crashes almost every night, and sometimes during the day
  • this morning, the linux client hadn’t crashed, but it was consuming 150% of a CPU
  • the number of requests to my apache server has gone up astronomically, mostly “PROPFIND” requests on ownCloud.
  • when I noticed a dozen or so directories in Documents that I don’t need any more and attempted to remove them on the linux box, 3 of them came back. One of them came back seven or eight times, as I removed it on Linux box and then the web interface, and finally on the Mac

I also tried installing the client on a 32 bit Linux virtualbox vm, and was able to get it to sync the default “ownCloud” directory, but I couldn’t get it to sync “Documents”.

In spite of these problems, as a file sharer I think it’s an awesome idea. I might try blowing the installation away and recreating it to see if that clears some of the annoyances.

Having a central store for my calendar is pretty nice, and I can use caldav to add that calendar to my iPad calendar and others. I exported my whole google calendar and imported it into e owncloud calendar without too much trouble. The drawback is I don’t see any easy way to allow Vicki to copy things onto my calendar like she does with my google calendar. Also, their web interface is pretty basic, but like I say you can just point other calendar programs like the iOS and KDE ones at it.

So if you’re like me and wish Dropbox gave you more disk space, and you just happen to have a spare 20 or 30 gig of unused space on a server somewhere, give ownCloud a try.

Big changes coming

So I’ve decided to spend a few bucks to fix a few niggling little issues around the house, mostly in the computer department:

  • First off, I’m worried about some recent break-ins and vandalism in the neighborhood.
  • Secondly, and slightly related, when I’m working in my office at the back of the house, it would be nice to know when the FedEx guy is ninja-ing a non-delivery tag at the front door instead of ringing the doorbell and waiting. Or know when the dogs bark whether it’s somebody at the door or just a shadow across the road.
  • The wifi penetration in the house sucks – in some parts of the house, your device will show one bar but nothing will actually get through. And if the microwave is on, forget about getting any signal on the other side of it. I put in a wifi repeater but it’s dog slow, and it uses a different SSID so you have to switch between SSIDs as you move around the house.

So here is what I’m in the process of doing to fix all those things:

  • I bought a security camera – an Airsight PTZ Pro outdoor camera with pan/tilt/zoom. If I wanted to, I could hook up a microphone and speaker so I could yell at the FedEx delivery guy to wait for 5 seconds as I run down. I’ve been playing with it and it is pretty amazing, although I’ve found one big flaw (more on that later)
  • I am running network cable from my office down into the basement, and from the basement up into the far corner of the basement, the dining room, and out to the front porch. The cable is currently pulled, but it’s not terminated and tested yet.
  • I’ve got a 8 port Gigabit Ethernet switch tacked to the wall where the first network cable drop comes down.
  • In the far corner of the basement, I’ve got a second router ready to install. I’m going to put this on the same SSID as the main one upstairs, and the same password, but on a different channel, turn off DHCP, and run the outgoing cable from my main router into the “WLAN” port of this one. I believe this will make the switchover from one to the other transparent so you don’t have to remember to switch SSIDs as you walk around the house, and it should perform a lot better than using the repeater. As an added bonus, it also supports 5GHz.
  • In the dining room, where Vicki spends 90% of her time when she’s using her computer, especially when she’d doing Second Life for work, there will be a wired network drop. Wifi is all well and good, especially 5GHz, but nothing beats wired.
  • The camera allows power over ethernet (or PoE as they call it in the brochure). So since I had to run power out to it anyway, I figured I’d give it the advantages of a wired connection, and run it all through the same wire.
  • The camera has the option to upload pictures and recordings to an FTP server. I figured that’s not much good to you if the thieves break in and steal your computer as well, so I’ve ordered a tiny little Raspberry Pi (aka Rπ). I already have a hard disk taken from a laptop that’s not doing anything, so I figure I can set up a tiny little FTP server and hide it somewhere where thieves won’t find it even if they’re ransacking the house. A closet, an obscure corner of the basement, even hidden inside the walls somewhere. These things are amazingly tiny. And I’m considering also using the Rπ to run ZoneMinder as an alternative to the built-in functionality because of the already foreshadowed flaw in the camera.

Ok, so what is this big flaw you’ve been talking about, I hear you ask? Well, it’s simple. The camera has the option to, when it detects motion, email you 5 pictures and start recording video to an ftp server. It also has the ability to pan and tilt and zoom. Those are two awesome features, right there. So what’s the problem? Well, when you set it panning, it interprets *that* as actionable movement and starts sending you emails. Not a good thing if you want it to continuously pan back and forwards. There is another option in the camera that lets you set up a bunch of fixed locations and have it cycle between those locations at intervals. I haven’t yet tested it to see if it’s smart enough to ignore movement while it’s moving between locations.

Oh, in other techie stuff, I finally got around to upgrading my Gallery site to Gallery3. In spite of the promises, the “Gallery 2 Importer” isn’t able to properly translate the URLs that Gallery 2 used to Gallery 3, so links to the Gallery are probably all broken. I did put in a mod_rewrite rule to take care of some of them, but not direct links to image files. Also, I seem to have lost all my raw pictures and movies.

I’m also currently looking into installing “ownCloud” as a way to get more space than I have with Dropbox without paying for it. I want enough space that I can throw my entire Documents folder on it instead of having to think “do I need this on all my machines, or is it ok if it’s just here” for every file. Since one of the two people renting space on my colo box never pays his rent except when I send him an email asking him if he’s still using it, I think I know where I can lay my hands on 100Gb of disk space on a server in a rack really cheap.